Pay For Your Pleasures: What Provocative Art Can Teach Us About the Boundaries of Free Expression

On Friday, Jan. 16, 2015, at noon in the Halls of Fame room in Carroll Hall, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy will host an interdisciplinary lunch open to faculty and graduate students from across the Carolina campus. The topic will be “Pay For Your Pleasures: What Provocative Art Can Teach Us About the Boundaries of Free Expression.” The discussion will be led by Cary Levine, associate professor of contemporary art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A free lunch will be served to all who register below.

Professor Levine recently published Pay for Your Pleasures with the University of Chicago Press (2013). The book examines the work of artists Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon and their transgressive (and anti-transgressive) art practices in the wake of the social revolution of the 1960s. It reviews the careers of these controversial artists as well as the sociopolitical issues they address in their work and the role of the grotesque, the obscene and the absurd in art and politics. What did these artists hope to achieve and communicate with their work? What was the public and legal response to such art? Join us for what we expect will be a lively discussion across artistic, cultural and legal disciplines about the role of such art in a democratic society.